Archive for the ‘Timor’ Category
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
Peter Rodgers; The Australian; 30/1/10;
Peter Rodgers worked in Indonesia as a diplomat and journalist and received the Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year award for his reporting on East Timor.
If You Leave Us Here We Will Die: How Genocide Was Stopped In East Timor; By Geoffrey Robinson; Princeton University Press, 319pp, $54.95
Geoffrey Robinson is a campaigner, determined to prove that Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975 led to genocide and that a second Indonesian-created genocide in 1999 was prevented only by UN-led armed intervention. The broad-brush nature of the UN Convention, which he relies on, gives him a head start. Its definition of genocide includes the killing of or causing harm to national, ethnic racial or religious groups “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”. Early in the book Robinson writes that there is no evidence that the Indonesian army commanders who planned the operation in East Timor in 1975 intended to kill one-third of the population. Yet, he argues, the very nature of the “culture of terror” fostered within the Indonesian military “inevitably and predictably led to a massive loss of life”.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Timor, UN
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Friday, January 29th, 2010
Rory Callinan; 29/1/10
UN peacekeepers stood by and watched as the East Timorese police they were supposed to be mentoring allegedly hit, kicked and repeatedly stomped on a young man near an official ceremony. The incident late last year raises concerns about the supervision and training provided to the local police by the UN Integrated Mission in East Timor, which is supported by a contingent of Australian Federal Police and Australian soldiers. The beating, which involved Policia Nacional de Timor-Leste officers allegedly grinding their heels into the man’s back up to a dozen times, kicking him in the head and hitting him with a rifle butt, came to light after film of the incident was handed to East Timorese authorities this month. The film, since posted on the internet, initially shows a young man with a sign relating to a local fishing group standing on a beach on Atauro Island where East Timor President Jose Ramos Horta was opening a fishing competition about 25km north of Dili.
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Tags: Australia, Timor, UN, Violence
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Monday, January 25th, 2010
25/1/10
Three policemen and three mine workers have been wounded in a shooting ambush near US company Freeport McMoRan’s massive gold and copper mine in Indonesia’s West Papua region. They were hurt when a convoy of buses and Land Cruisers heading to the coastal city of Timika from the Grasberg mine was attacked yesterday. ”The national police and the military are still chasing (the shooters),” police spokesman Agus Riyanto said. The attack is the latest in a string of mysterious ambushes on the road.
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Tags: Human Rights, Indonesia, Terrorism, West Timor
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Monday, January 25th, 2010
25/1/10
Three policemen and three mine workers have been wounded in a shooting ambush near US company Freeport McMoRan’s massive gold and copper mine in Indonesia’s West Papua region. They were hurt when a convoy of buses and Land Cruisers heading to the coastal city of Timika from the Grasberg mine was attacked yesterday. ”The national police and the military are still chasing (the shooters),” police spokesman Agus Riyanto said. The attack is the latest in a string of mysterious ambushes on the road.
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Tags: Human Rights, Indonesia, Terrorism, West Timor
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Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
Jill Jollife ; 9/11/09
The emergence of retired colonel Gatot Purwanto as a whistleblowing Indonesian officer in the Balibo five case has revealed the first cracks in Jakarta’s military monolith after 34 years of stubborn silence over the true cause of the deaths of the ill-fated reporters – Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart from Channel Seven and Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie from Channel Nine, shot dead in the East Timor border town of Balibo in October 1975 as they filmed Indonesian troops advancing into the village. The former special forces officer attended a clandestine viewing of Robert Connolly’s film Balibo, which was banned in Jakarta, a ban defied by the Alliance of Independent Journalists who invited Gatot Purwanto to its screening. Colonel Purwanto had been prominent in key events of Indonesia’s 24-year occupation of East Timor.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Indonesia, Timor
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Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
Stephen Fitzpatrick; 8/12/09
The Balibo Five were deliberately killed during Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, according to a retired commando who was in the special forces squad that shot them. It is the first time a senior Indonesian has broken ranks with the official line that the five Australian-based journalists — Greg Shackleton, Tony Stewart, Gary Cunningham, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie — died accidentally in crossfire in the small town of Balibo. According to Colonel Gatot Purwanto, members of “Team Susi”, the squad responsible for the deaths, were waiting for orders from Jakarta about whether to arrest or execute the men when, in response to shots fired from the direction of the house the journalists were hiding in, the Indonesians launched their fatal attack. The explosive revelations are contained in the latest edition of Tempo magazine, which interviewed Colonel Purwanto after a clandestine screening of the film Balibo in Jakarta last week by the Indonesian Journalists Alliance.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Indonesia, Timor
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Saturday, December 5th, 2009
Miki Perkins; 5/12/09
When Lucie Kovarik, 18, drove with her fellow students from the airport into the East Timorese capital, Dili, she glimpsed things she had never seen before. In shanty towns next to the river, many houses had holes in their iron roofs. There were buildings still empty 10 years after they had been all but destroyed during the bloody birth of East Timorese independence. ”We tried to be prepared for it but it was a massive shock,” Lucie said, speaking from Dili. ”But everyone was so welcoming – they tried to speak English to us and we tried to speak Tetum back to them.” For the past 10 days, Lucie and 11 other year 12 students from Kilbreda College in Mentone have been volunteering their time in East Timor as an alternative to the traditional end-of-year schoolies break.
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Tags: Australia, Timor, Young People
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Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
3/12/09; Stephen Fitzpatrick
Indonesia’s national journalists association plans to defy a government ban on the movie Balibo, kicking off a countrywide “roadshow” tour for the film with a free public screening in Jakarta today. Balibo was banned on Tuesday afternoon, less than two hours ahead of a planned screening by the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club and just days ahead of its inclusion in the Jakarta film festival.Under the country’s censorship laws, members of the Alliansi Jurnalis Indonesia will face five years in jail and/or a 50 million rupiah ($5679) fine for each time they screen the film.The feature, directed by Bob Connolly and featuring Australian Hollywood star Anthony LaPaglia, dramatises the murders of the so-called Balibo Five at the hands of the Indonesian military during the 1975 invasion of East Timor.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Indonesia, Timor
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Monday, November 30th, 2009
Tony Birtley; 30/11/09
East Timor sits on an oil-mine of wealth worth billions of dollars, yet the country is still one of the poorest in Asia. It suffers from shockingly high rates of child mortality and is struggling to contain the spread of the HIV virus. Al Jazeera’s Tony Birtley reports from the capital Dili on whythe situation could drastically worsen unless measures are taken to improve nutrition, sanitation and access to clean water.
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Tags: Children, Human Rights, Timor
Posted in HIV-AIDS, Health & Children, Human Rights, Timor | No Comments »
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Isidoro V. da Costa, JRS-Timor Leste – Project Director; JRS- Asia Pacific Issue 75, PO Box 49, Sanampao Post Office, Bangkok 10406, Thailand 28/11/09
Mrs. Elisa is an old widowed woman. Her husband was a Timorese soldier during the Portuguese colonial time. When Indonesian troops invaded Timor Leste (after independence in 1975) she and her husband fled with their son to the mountains. Soon after, her husband left them to continue to fight and defend their country. Their son later died and Mrs. Elisa and her husband returned to Dili where they subsequently adopted two boys.
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Tags: Human Right, Indonesia, Timor
Posted in Human Rights, Indonesia, Timor, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Fr. Bernard Hyacinth Arputhasamy, S.J., JRS-AP Regional Director; JRS- Asia Pacific Issue 75, PO Box 49, Sanampao Post Office, Bangkok 10406, Thailand
[Editor's note: At the time of writing, the Society of Jesus of East Timor was preparing for a memorial mass in Suai for Fr Dewanto on 8th September 2009 and on 11th September for Fr Karl at the grounds of Loyola Jesuit residence where he was killed].Adapted from friends of IRS — Fr. Mark Raper SJ, Fr. Steve Curtin SJ and Fr. Adrianus Suyadi.
Remembering Fr. Karl Albrecht Karim Arbie, S.J. and Fr. Tarcisius Dewanto, S.J.
During the recent 150 year celebrations of the Indonesian Province last July, the mother of Fr Tarcisius Dewanto came to meet the Jesuit Superior General Fr Adolfo Nicolas who was visiting Central Java. While she was waiting for Fr Nicolas to finish talking with the Indonesian novices, I was privileged to spend some minutes talking with her. Fr Dewanto, a 34 year old Jesuit ordained on 14th July 1999 and immediately missioned to East Timor, was one of over 200 people, among them were 3 priests, killed in a massacre in the parish church of Suai on 6 September 1999. Suai is a coastal town in the potentially fertile district of Cova-Lima, 140 kilometres South West of Dili.
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Tags: Human Rights, Indonesia, Timor
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Thursday, November 26th, 2009
Daniel Flitton; 26/11/09
East Timor has warned it will abandon a multibillion-dollar deal with Australia to exploit natural gas fields in the Timor Sea unless a pipeline is built to deliver the bounty directly to the impoverished nation. Francisco da Costa Monteiro, special adviser to East Timor’s secretary of state for natural resources, flew into Canberra yesterday for talks with federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson in an attempt to break the impasse. East Timor wants gas from the Greater Sunrise project to be piped about 200 kilometres to East Timor’s southern coastline, with a plant to be built for processing.A consortium led by resources company Woodside will develop the project.
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Tags: Australia, Timor, Trade
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Saturday, November 21st, 2009
(1) Tony Hillier; 21/11/09; Ego Lemos; Skinnyfish Music
Common denominators link East Timor’s Ego Lemos and Australia’s Gurrumul Yunupingu. Apart from the fact their debut solo albums are out on the same Darwin-based label and they share the same producer and sound engineer, their music possesses subliminal power. Although sung in a language (East Timor’s lingua franca Tetum) as obscure to most as Gurrumul’s Aboriginal tongue, Lemos’s soulful, upper- register delivery also connects emotionally with non-native as well as indigenous listeners.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Music, Timor
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Monday, November 9th, 2009
Michael Mullins; 9/11/09
Michael Mullins is editor of Eureka Street.
Yesterday Retired General Peter Cosgrove delivered the first of this year’s Boyer Lectures for the ABC. The choice of Cosgrove was no doubt a tribute to his success at leading the INTERFET peacekeeping force in East Timor ten years ago. It was a fraught moment when nobody was sure how, or indeed whether, the country would be able to rebuild itself after the violent and destructive end to the 25 years of Indonesian occupation. Skillful leadership was required, and Cosgrove is credited with having delivered. Interviewed by Geraldine Doogue on Friday, he said that you win a military struggle when you achieve a state of affairs that permits you to leave the locals to take care of the problems that remain. His message is that local citizens with strong leadership skills are critical to fragile nations maintaining security and fostering development. He also said in the interview that women ‘make the most magnificent leaders. They do it in a different style, they find a way of success that is less bull at a gate.’
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Tags: Timor, Womens Rights
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Friday, November 6th, 2009
6/11/09
A former senior public servant will head a commission of inquiry into the recent oil spill in the Timor Sea. (PTTEP ERG Media) East Timor wants compensation from the Australian Government for any environmental damage caused by an oil leak from a rig in the Timor Sea. The Montara oil rig, which is 250 kilometres from East Timor’s coastline, was expelling 400 barrels of oil a day for two months until the leak was stopped earlier this week. East Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta says the spill is the responsibility of the Australian Government and the Thai company that owns the platform.
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Tags: Australia, Environment, Timor, Trade
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Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Iain Shedden, 3/11/09; (2 Items)
The raw emotion of director Robert Connolly’s movie Balibo filled the stage of Sydney’s City Recital Hall last night, as music from the film took the main titles at the annual APRA Screen Music Awards. Lisa Gerrard, the Australian composer of the film’s score, and Timorese songwriter Ego Lemos, who wrote the title song, received best feature film score and best original song composed for a film respectively. Connolly’s account of the slaughter of five Australian journalists, the Balibo Five, in 1975 is one of the main contenders for this year’s AFI Awards. As the director watched from the audience last night, Gerrard and Lemos gave stirring performances of their contributions to the film. “The whole film has a wonderful message,” said Gerrard, whose other movie credits include Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. The composer admitted that the heart-wrenching nature of the story made the writing of some of the music a daunting task.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Timor, Trade
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